FOSS Backstage 2026

Shifting Left on Human Rights?
2026-03-16 , Auditorium

The W3C integrates accessibility, security, and ethics into web standards. Inspired by UN human rights recommendations, this talk explores the W3C’s review process, its vital importance, and how these principles can be applied to other domains.


In Open Standards and specifically in W3C, we have a culture and a process of wide review to ensure that specifications that
move through our process are evaluated for things like accessibility, internationalisation, privacy and security. We also have
introduced ethical considerations. Meanwhile the UN Office of the Hight Commissioner of Human Rights has released a report last
year about how Open Standards development organisations can and should be incorporating human rights into their process. This
talk is a speed run through what we're doing in this space in W3C, why it matters - and hopefully how it could be applied to other
domains.

See also: Slides (626.7 KB)